3/10/2019

Thoughts On A Sunday

It’s been a snowy day today here in New Hampshire, with about 4 inches falling here at The Gulch. It was also the day that Deb and I went to our tax guy to get our 2018 taxes done. Considering the heaviest of the snow was falling when we were on our way to our tax guy’s office, 4WD was a necessity. The roads went from barely dusted to covered in less than half an hour.

At least the a lot of the snow that’s fallen today won’t be around all that long as we’ll be seeing temps in the 50’s by the end of the week.

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The recent fiasco surrounding the building of Amazon’s partial HQ2 in New York is the latest development in the war against free enterprise. Because of opposition from anti-business politicians, notably Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Amazon decided to pull the plug on investing billions of dollars into the campus that was planned for construction in Queens.

The loss of the venture—which would have created 25,000 new jobs paying an average salary of $150,000 per year—marks a significant loss for the area economy and is a window into the future if the Left’s newly intensified anti-business canon is left unshackled.

Ocasio-Cortez’s “Green New Deal” is a set of goals that embodies this extreme agenda—a platform comprised of socialist policies claimed to be silver bullet solutions to everything from climate change to income inequality. The resolution not only calls on Congress to eliminate a vast majority of current energy infrastructure and renovate or rebuild all structures in the country, but seeks to upend the U.S. Constitution as we know it—including its safeguards for free enterprise.

The history of the Left’s success when it takes control of economics is dismal. The most recent example of the Left’s failure is Venezuela. They took control of every aspect of the country’s economy and destroyed it. Venezuela was the wealthiest nation in South America. Now it’s the poorest. On top of that, they can’t even keep the lights on. That is the future the Left has in store for us if they have their way, AOC’s Green New Deal ‘utopia’ notwithstanding.

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As a follow-on to the above, there’s this from Steve Sheldon that shows us that the Left can’t do math. If they could, they’d realize that no matter how much money they take away from the wealthy they won’t have nearly enough to pay for all the socialist utopian things they’ve promised to deliver.

They won’t even be close.

Yet there are Leftists (like Kamala Harris) who think that the costs of things like the Green New Deal can be safely ignored. It has a price tag of $93 trillion. That’s trillion with a ‘T’. That’s almost 5 times the US Gross Domestic Product.

That’s not something cannot be ignored unless your plan is to destroy the US economy and return us to a hand-to-mouth existence. (Of course the Leftist Powers That Be won’t have to live that way, just the peons, meaning anyone who is not them.)

This is one of the things they have in mind for us:

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Maine, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire are at the extreme eastern edge of the Eastern Time Zone. The Eastern Time zone is quite ‘wide’ at the northern latitudes in the US. Looking at a North American Time Zone Map one can see that moving the three states into the Atlantic Time Zone makes sense. Daylight Savings Time would go away and the need to change the clocks twice a year would do likewise.

I can certainly live with that.

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Town meeting is this coming Tuesday here in New Hampshire. It’s where voters in various towns will gather to vote on their town’s spending, zoning ordinance changes, and other issues. School district meetings will be a couple of days later for some towns. Both of these meetings determine how much the towns will spend and in turn how much the townsfolk will be paying in property taxes.

It is this last part that many Flatlanders have a difficult time understanding.

They move in “from away”, propose all kinds of spending for nice-to-haves to recreate what it has they had where they came from, and then get upset when their property taxes go up if they get their way. They have a total cognitive disconnect between spending and taxes. They don’t understand that there is rarely a source of funds outside of those from their town. The state isn’t likely to provide funds for nice-to-haves when they have so many need-to-haves to take care of first.

As an aside, if the state has surplus funds they tend to go one of two places: the state’s Rainy Day Fund or back to the towns in the form of additional funding for things like road paving/reconstruction, water projects, and other projects that have already been approved and are in progress. (No new projects can be funded this way.) The additional funding helps towns do more work on existing projects such as road paving and reconstruction. Towns usually have a list of roads that will be repaved/repaired each year and they budget for that list. If additional funds become available, some roads from the next year’s list are moved up to this year. So far I haven’t heard anyone complain because their road will be fixed and repaved a year earlier than originally planned.

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And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where the snow is still falling, dreams of the upcoming boating season are intruding, and where Monday has yet again come around too soon.